The Hill reports what any honest observer of the republic must find alarming: that American public education is in a state of prolonged, accelerating decline — the author's image is of passengers on a slowly sinking ship, too comfortable or too distracted to reach for the pumps. I find the metaphor apt, and I would add only that the passengers who will drown first are those who cannot afford a private lifeboat.

I argued in the Wealth of Nations that a sovereign has three legitimate duties: defense, justice, and the maintenance of certain public works and institutions that private profit will never adequately supply. Education of the common people is the foremost of those institutions. The workman whose whole life is spent performing a handful of simple operations has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention. Without some public provision to correct this narrowing, the division of labor — the very engine of our prosperity — produces, as its byproduct, a population unfit to govern itself or to judge those who govern it.

This is not a sentimental point. It is a structural one. A market economy requires citizens who can read a contract, weigh a claim, and recognize when they are being deceived. The merchant who sells to an ignorant buyer is tempted to cheat; the politician who addresses an ignorant electorate is tempted to demagogue. The moral sentiments that make commerce honest — sympathy, the capacity to imagine oneself in another's position, the internalized standard of the impartial spectator — are cultivated, not innate. They require instruction. When that instruction fails at scale, the entire framework of honest exchange is weakened from below.

I would ask, as I always ask: what institution disciplines this failure? The market, left alone, will not correct it — because the costs of an ignorant population are diffuse, falling on everyone, while the savings from underfunding a school are immediate and concentrated in the accounts of those who set the budget. This is precisely the kind of collective-action problem that only public provision can solve. The argument that private schooling or charitable effort will fill the gap is the argument of every merchant who wishes the sovereign to bear the costs of the roads his wagons use, while he pockets the tolls. It does not hold.

The Hill's warning — that we have reached something like a point of structural collapse — I cannot verify in its particulars, having no memory of the data that would be required. But I take the disposition of the argument seriously, and I would mark it as consistent with everything I understood about what happens when a sovereign treats education as a luxury rather than a foundation. The wealth of a nation is, in the end, the productive capacity of its people. Neglect that, and no quantity of tariffs, subsidies, or monetary maneuver will restore what has been quietly surrendered.